Following an open letter from Boston activists that urged the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston to cancel its current Dana Schutz survey, a group of National Academy of Art members and members-elect has penned a missive of its own in support of the artist and the exhibition. Many artists and architects, from Annabelle Selldorf to Ed Ruscha, have signed the letter, which was emailed to ARTnews last night by artist Barbara Grossman.

The National Academy letter is a direct response to a six-page outline sent to Eva Respini, the curator of the ICA show, by a group of protestors. (Megan Smith, Allison Disher, Stephanie Houten, Pampi, and Vonds DuBuisson are the authors of that letter, which appeared online last week in the form of a Google Doc.) “We were hoping to hear the ICA resist the narrative that Black people can be sacrificed for the greater good,” the artists wrote, referring to the controversy that erupted over a Schutz painting at the Whitney Biennial earlier this year.

Four months before the ICA show opened, Schutz exhibited her 2016 painting Open Casket (2016) in that Whitney show. The work, based on a photograph of Emmett Till’s open-casket funeral, created an impassioned debate about identity and art-making. Hannah Black wrote a strongly worded letter to the Biennial’s curators, Mia Locks and Christopher Y. Lew, asking the Whitney to destroy Open Casket because Schutz, who is white, had used “Black pain as raw material.” Ultimately, the painting remained on view for the Biennial’s entire run and was not destroyed.

Open Casket is not included in the ICA Boston exhibition, but the signatories of the letter consider it an important part of Schutz’s narrative. “Please pull the show,” reads the letter, which says at one point “we are unconvinced that ICA has the will to challenge the egregiousness of continued institutional backing of this type of violent artifact.”

The National Academy letter responds to that protest: “As fellow artists and architects,” it reads, “we wholeheartedly support cultural institutions like the ICA-Boston who refuse to bow to forces in favor of censorship or quelling dialogue.” The letter and its list of signatories follow in full below.

August 3, 2017

As members of the National Academy, we would like to voice our unequivocal support for Dana Schutz, who was recently excoriated by a group of Boston artists who were demanding that her current exhibition at the ICA in Boston be canceled, a demand meant to penalize Schutz, the artist behind Open Casket, a controversial painting featured at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, which draws on the well-known photograph of Emmett Till lying disfigured in his casket.

This painting is not included in the ICA exhibition.

As fellow artists and architects, we wholeheartedly support cultural institutions like the ICA-Boston who refuse to bow to forces in favor of censorship or quelling dialogue.

It is also of the utmost importance to us that artists not perpetrate upon each other the same kind of intolerance and tyranny that we criticize in others.

We support the ICA-Boston and its decision to exhibit the works of Dana Schutz, and to maintain programming that fosters conversations between people with different points of view, especially given our current political climate of intolerance.